ADELBODEN, SWITZERLAND — Ever since I got back to Europe after Christmas break, it’s been snowing. We haven’t really been able to train. We’ve been skiing a lot of powder, which has been fun, but not super-productive in terms of training.
Adelboden is one of the best giant slaloms on the tour. There’s just a ton of history here, and it’s a really cool hill. It’s very steep at the top, and then it has a long rolling fall-away section. It goes dead flat onto a “basketball turn,” followed by a steep pitch which is basically a free-fall.
Considering how much snow they’ve gotten, conditions for Saturday’s giant slalom and Sunday’s slalom were actually pretty good. But the first run of GS was one of the longest, time-wise, that Adelboden has had. Just about everybody, including me, was pretty pooped at the bottom of the course.
You could see a lot of guys were pretty fast at the top but didn’t enough gas at the bottom. That was a big part of the reason there were 28 DNFs in the first run and only 37 finishers, which is very unusual for giant slalom.
The second run was more of a normal course. But it was snowing, and the visibility was pretty poor. I made a couple of mistakes in the middle part of that second run that ended up costing me the race. I was only .14 of a second behind the winner, Marcel Hirscher of Austria, and finished fourth.
It’s actually my best GS finish here. Adelboden has always been the white whale for me. I’ve DNFd here a bunch of times, and my best result here before this weekend was ninth.
That Hirscher won was bad for me in the standings GS standings. I’m only leading him by 15 points now, and he’s on a roll. With my GS as good as it is right now, I expect to be winning. So to finish fourth, even though it’s a good position, isn’t satisfying.
Luckily the next GS isn’t for a month, so the schedule could be a momentum killer for Hirscher. Hopefully I can get back on top next time we have another GS.
Ligety, the reigning World Cup giant slalom champion, reports regularly from the tour in collaboration with Denver Post ski writer John Meyer.
